Sample and selection of informants

The sample of this study consists of the members of Ethereum Helsinki Meetup.

Ethereum Helsinki Meetup is a group facilitated through ‘Meetup’ online platform (www.meetup.com) that allows users to set up groups according to their shared interests and to organize meetings for group members. Joining the group and the meetings is voluntary, free and open to everyone but requires a registration to the Meetup platform.

At the time of starting the study (16.11.2016) the group held 133 members of which around 15–25 attended monthly meetings (Appendix III) taking place every second Wednesday of the month. These frequent participants were the first focus of the data collection as I assumed them to have the richest knowledge of the working of the group as well as have a strong personal connection or agenda, which draws them to the meetings repeatedly. However, as the data collection progressed, the target sample was modified to include a variety of informants differing in their ‘seniority’ level in the group (measured by the number of meetup visits) and their background, aiming at collecting a sample that would best reflect the observed nature of the meetups as a meeting point for novel and advanced, young and old, coming from a business, academic or technical background.

I utilized multiple methods in identifying and approaching prospective interviewees.

Firstly, I attended the group meeting to identify informants and to establish a personal relationship, as recommended by Haug (2013). Before the meeting, my thesis supervisor helped establishing a connection between me and the organizer, and I agreed

with the organizer that I could study the group. In the meeting the group’s founder and organizer presented my study inviting participants on my behalf. After the meeting, I sent an email invitation to those who had given me their contact information.

Simultaneously, I sent a general invitation online in the meetup.com group to all participants and contacted the most active participants that I had not met yet via private message through the meetup.com platform. The choice of interviewees was limited by access (availability of contact information) and availability (timing) as well as interviewees’ own interest to participate.

The sample consists of eight one-to-one interviews carried out in January 2017. The interviewees came from different sectors from IT and software to finance and education, four being entrepreneurs with a business related to blockchain or Ethereum, three being industry experts and one being an independent researcher. All interviewees lived in Finland, and the interviews were conducted in Finnish, as it was the mother tongue of all the interviewees and the researcher. All interviewees were male due to the scarcity of women in the group, especially among the most active members. The informants ranged in age from 28 to 52, with most in their 30s or 40s. As experience level of the group was used as a sampling criterion, I categorized the interviewees according to their seniority level in the group as follows:

• Newcomers: maximum 2 visits (3 interviewees)

• Regulars: three to five visits (2 interviewees)

• Seniors: six or more visits (3 interviewees)

Additionally, one interviewee was also one of the two founders and organizers of the group. Six of the interviewees I had met before prior to the interview and two of the interviews I came to know either through a reference of a mutual contact (1) or by contacting them directly via meetup.com platform (1).

After the eighth interview I decided to stop the data collection, as no new aspects seemed to appear, despite of the diversity of interviewees, following the recommendation by Eskola and Suoranta, (1998) that data should be collected only as

much as necessary. In addition, I utilized a ‘snowball-method’ (Eskola & Suoranta, 1998) asking interviewees to refer next possible interviewees until same names started to repeat. Some time after the interviews I contacted the organizers to ask for any reports or additional data they might have, and was provided with the data on member statistics and sign ups through meetup.com website.

3.3.1 Timeline of data collection

Table 2 illustrates the three phases of data collection. First phase of the research consisted of analyzing comments posted in the Ethereum Helsinki Meetup group and associated social media channels as well as visiting the meetup on December 14th, 2016. The purpose of attending the meetup was to observe the settings of the meeting, to test initial theory conceptualization, and to locate and gain access to prospective interviewees. The second phase consisted of interviews with eight members of the group and visiting the Ethereum Helsinki meetup on January 11th, 2017. The last phase consisted of contacting the organizers to receive data on the membership base and participation rates.

Table 2. Timeline of data collection.

Phase Year Month Description

1 2016

Analysis of Ethereum Meetup Helsinki site on meetup.com, Youtube and Facebook*

3 2017 April Retrieval of member statistics from meetup.com platform

* Overlapping with initial literature reading

3.3.2 Data limitations and ethical considerations

The data collection procedures and the resulting material are subject to certain limitations. Firstly, the case focuses on a certain period of time, the group’s first year of

existence. The data is based on the experiences of interviewees and the meetings they have attended, and might not describe the experiences of every participant. Secondly, I acknowledge the researcher’s influence in the data collection. As mentioned in the previously in section 3.1, I had prevailing assumptions of the nature of the organization (social movement) and its nature (ideological). This guided the type of questions I asked, as shown in the interview guide, and this might have lead the informants to regard some possibly fruitful topics. Related to the downsides of using theme-based interview technique, the respondents could also have missed something important because it was not directly asked. Additionally, people tend to focus on things that they can remember at that moment, and the same respondent might give a different answer if interviewed again in another time and place (Eskola & Suoranta, 1998).

The role of ethics has received increasing attention in business research (Eriksson &

Kovalainen, 2008), and ethical considerations are also visible in the research design and process of this study. As mentioned in the earlier chapter, I chose not to conduct observations due to my concerns of obtaining an informed consent from all participants as well as respecting the confidential relationship between the researcher and the people in the focus of the research. Secondly, during the data collection I followed the general ethical guidelines for research by Eriksson and Kovalainen (2008) and Finnish Social Science Data Archive’s Data management guidelines based on the Finnish Legislation (Finnish Social Science Data Archive, n.d.). This included obtaining an informed consent, making the participation explicitly voluntary, and ensuring the privacy of the informants and the confidentiality of the data gathered.

Having discussed how the research was designed and how the data was collected, I next describe the path from collected data to my conclusions.